Tag: Preschool

Using adapted Books in SPED

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Its not as hard as it sound to adapt any favourite book and make it interactive! You can target so many skills, like sentence starters, colour, shape, sentence structure, and sequencing, for Special Ed students.

I decided not to adapt a shop book but create and direct a version towards communication and understanding in more depth that would be more meaningful for young SPED students.

I loved simplifying these popular stories so my young learners could access them, especially Fairy-tale favourites. It was fantastic to seeing them learning to comment on what they were seeing in the book, remembering the story sequence, identifying the visuals to answer the “I can see questions, learning Story vocabulary and answer “who “questions about these characters.

I couldn’t stop incorporating more learning strategies into these story sets and added story words, (story vocab on a ring) to teach character recognition.

and sequencing boards and cards!

Once printed out on card stock they were quick and easy to laminate and assemble with a ring binders and Velcro for visuals.

My Daily Planner Binder – Back to School for Kids with Autism

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On the first day back to school I always introduce my Interactive Planner Binder to keep my young learners focused and motivated! Its full of visual strategies to help them plan their day, choose they’re reinforcer and stay in the area where they need to work.

I laminated the ones i made but you could easily place them in a pocket folder and use a dry wipe marker.

I’ve incorporated pages for my new students to jot down their name, grade and class, followed by their teachers name, their friends name, things they like and things they don’t.

There are pages with the days of the week for them to practice and tick off what day it is and same for seasons.

Having a schedule is so important so I’ve added spaces where i can write the order of the day and they can tick off as they go though it, handy to keep them on track!

Working for cards and reward choice keep them motivated!

Reminders of what to do when they feel angry, “first and then” when they get frustrated and what “I need” visuals for them to choose from.

Visuals for Communication in the Classroom

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Setting up Visuals

I started jotting down what visuals my students needed to help with frustration and classwork until I realised what a big task!   So I decided to cut down my list to a manageable workload and think about what things they wanted and needed the most.    Here are the categories I thought would be good to start off with –

  1. Things in the class,  2.Tasks in class,  3. I’m feeling, 4. fidget toys,  what I need

 1. Classroom Things

I wanted some visuals to include basic everyday class things so they could point out what they needed or having trouble finding.

2. Tasks

I wanted visuals of the tasks available so my students could indicate a choice and find things they liked doing.

3. Feelings

These are important visuals to understand, practice and use to communicate how they are feeling.

4. Fidgets

A selection of fidget toys could also be used as motivators to regulate themselves, calm down emotions, which I’ve found very handy.

5. Me

Things for themselves, such as their bag, the toilet, a tissue, time to relax and reduce some of their frustration using these visuals to support stress and anxiety.